Planet's axis tilt

Discussion in 'Planetary Annihilation General Discussion' started by totalannihilation, March 5, 2014.

  1. totalannihilation

    totalannihilation Active Member

    Messages:
    215
    Likes Received:
    168
    It has been a while since I notcied that the developers have added the tilt angle of the planet's axis.
    How can I be so sure? When you slowly zoom out of the planet, you will notice that suddenly the north and south icons tilt with respect to the orbit plane

    Some will be asking what is a planet's axis tilt and what it does.
    There are several definitions for planet's axis tilt, the easiest one to understand is: "It is the angle between the planet's rotating axis and the normal of the plane of the planet's orbit (whew! that was a long phrase)"
    basically, it can be resumed in this picture
    In this picture, it is described as the planet declination, but the term declination is used in the Equatorial Coordinate system.
    [​IMG]

    What it does?
    The two most important things are:
    • it gives the seasons to the planet
    • the artic and antartic circle have the 24hr sun day phenomena and the 24hr night

    My question here is: now that the developers implemented the axial tilt, what features are they going to add along with it?
    Can we manually set the declination at the system editor?
    Last edited: March 6, 2014
    cwarner7264 and overwatch141 like this.
  2. overwatch141

    overwatch141 Active Member

    Messages:
    164
    Likes Received:
    66
    Would be a nice addition, but I don't think Uber will put it in the game. It doesn't really have an impact on gameplay and (AFAIK) there's no infrastructure for changing biomes mid-game.
    Maybe a mod could do this?
  3. Teod

    Teod Well-Known Member

    Messages:
    483
    Likes Received:
    268
    Yeah, I noticed that too. It's nice.
    But they already did that.
  4. tehtrekd

    tehtrekd Post Master General

    Messages:
    2,996
    Likes Received:
    2,772
    Wow, that's a really cool touch.
  5. aevs

    aevs Post Master General

    Messages:
    1,051
    Likes Received:
    1,150
    I'd like to correct you a bit on the terminology; what you're talking about is axial tilt, not declination. Declination is just one of the angles used to define a coordinate in the equatorial coordinate system.

    As for the subject of the thread; I noticed this a while ago, good to see that we're getting some nice details like this. It would be cool if we could define axial tilt manually, or if we got planets with extreme axial tilt, such as Uranus'.[​IMG]
    Honestly, I'd love if we could customize a planet's rotation speed, axial tilt and orbital inclination, but I'm not sure how important things like that are to the game. I've got a lot of other things I'd love to see too, like different star types, far less ambient light on planets without atmospheres (no light diffusion or Rayleigh scattering = white light and very dark shadows), planets acting as light sources for one another (think full moon vs. no moon), etc.

    But I suspect most of that is mod territory :rolleyes:
  6. cptconundrum

    cptconundrum Post Master General

    Messages:
    4,186
    Likes Received:
    4,900
    I'm still not seeing a tilt parameter in the planet json, so my guess is this is hard-coded on the server. If they ever change this so that it pulls the tilt parameter from the javascript object, we will be able to easily mod it.
  7. overwatch141

    overwatch141 Active Member

    Messages:
    164
    Likes Received:
    66
    Well they didn't add seasons so what do you mean?

    Could a mod add seasons?(biomes changing when a certain part of the planet gets warmer/colder)
  8. cptconundrum

    cptconundrum Post Master General

    Messages:
    4,186
    Likes Received:
    4,900
    Not currently, but after release it might be possible.
  9. bgolus

    bgolus Uber Alumni

    Messages:
    1,481
    Likes Received:
    2,299
    I wanted to build axial tilt in to the planet biome generator (grow / shrink the warm and cold bands around the poles and the equator), but we did not end up doing that. There's a lot about our planet biome generator that is in no way realistic, like we can have a hot desert planet on the outer orbit and a water planet skating across the surface of the sun. Really it's better this way as it leaves more control in the hands of users.

    Changing seasons is harder though as the system we have in place doesn't really deal well with subtle continual changes across large parts of the planet over time. It's an area of our biome system I would of loved to have spent more time on, but it's not something that makes a huge impact on the game so it's not a high priority. Maybe if we had the budget of Star Citizen... ;)

    I may eventually try to get the system generator to try to be a little more "realistic" in it's placement of planets and planet temperature settings, but for now it's pretty basic.

    (Similarly, it bugs me every time the generated system has a tiny moon style planet with a much larger planet orbiting it rather than the other way around.)
  10. cptconundrum

    cptconundrum Post Master General

    Messages:
    4,186
    Likes Received:
    4,900
    I really think it is fine if we have the control to do things that don't make sense. This is after all a game about cartoony robots smashing asteroids into planets covered by other robots. If you ever do another pass on random system generation (galactic war will need this), you may want to add limits to that so that it feels more realistic.
    wheeledgoat likes this.
  11. Teod

    Teod Well-Known Member

    Messages:
    483
    Likes Received:
    268
    Why don't you just make mass be equal to size by default? It's not a nerdy thing that would make a lot of people upset about "realism for the sake of realism", it's an immersion feature and in my opinion can even be considered a convenience, because you need to tweak one parameter instead of two.
    cwarner7264 likes this.
  12. aevs

    aevs Post Master General

    Messages:
    1,051
    Likes Received:
    1,150
    I disagree here, that limits the customization of the solar system.
    It's also not very accurate; Ganymede is larger than Mercury, but Mercury is over twice the mass of Ganymede, for example. If they were in orbit around each-other, the barycenter would be closer to Mercury despite it being the smaller body.
    totalannihilation likes this.
  13. websterx01

    websterx01 Post Master General

    Messages:
    1,682
    Likes Received:
    1,063
    It would be amazing to have the code built in so we can enable/mod it in easily! This stuff could get really cool really fast, even if it has no actual impact on game play. Immersion is always fun!
  14. bgolus

    bgolus Uber Alumni

    Messages:
    1,481
    Likes Received:
    2,299
    Not that we calculate the barycenter at all...

    Honestly I think it's there in two parts for when we eventually have asteroid belts or at least by default average more planets than just two. Our planetoid sizes aren't going to be in real world scales and we need to support asteroids that are possibly larger than a planet being a significantly lower mass.
    aevs likes this.
  15. totalannihilation

    totalannihilation Active Member

    Messages:
    215
    Likes Received:
    168
    Thanks for correcting me, the original post and the thread's title have been corrected now.


    Well, that sounds very cool and realistic
    I think to make it easier to implement, it should look like the sea tides, but having a very greater period
    While such thing is not implemented yet, having a different effects of light because of the axis tilt is a cool effect to add to the game
  16. thetrophysystem

    thetrophysystem Post Master General

    Messages:
    7,050
    Likes Received:
    2,874
    Yeah, they are right. Volume, and Density, are not always the same. Some cosmic bodies are super-dense, some are very fluffy, and Mercury is a good example. Mercury is apparently superdense, probably due to being older and longer compressed, maybe it collected all the iron lead and uranium, while it's moon is just some collective space rock which is probably mostly a liquid element. Didn't wikipedia, just a guess.
  17. arsene

    arsene Active Member

    Messages:
    166
    Likes Received:
    114
    If gravity would influence the fuel cost in escaping the planet's surface, then density would be a more relevant concept, but I suppose the current thinking is that this goes too far in terms of realism and is not necessary for the gameplay?
  18. aevs

    aevs Post Master General

    Messages:
    1,051
    Likes Received:
    1,150
    Mercury doesn't have a moon, I was comparing Mercury with one of Jupiter's moons (Ganymede) as an example, since Ganymede is pretty big and not very dense (Ganymede is supposedly mostly rock and ice, Mercury on the other hand is about as dense as earth).
    I also think it would be cool if some physics-based mechanics made it into the game. A unit cannon can only fire units across space if they can exceed escape velocity, and is otherwise limited to sub-orbital trajectories, maybe even with limited range if gravity is too strong. The unit cannon and orbital factories might be cheaper to operate in low gravity, as the energy used to launch units and the metal and energy required to build rockets would be significantly reduced. If it only influences buildings and micro-intensive units (big things that are individually important) I don't think it would be too confusing for players, especially if the game makes it clear what the effective range or operating cost will be before building them.

    All this discussion reminds me; I'm gonna need a KSP-like mod after the game's official release :D
    Robots fighting in space with poorly constructed physics-based weapons would be hilarious.
    Last edited: March 6, 2014
  19. Teod

    Teod Well-Known Member

    Messages:
    483
    Likes Received:
    268
    My mind is full of wat on this one. If a planet is smaller than the asteroid, isn't this planet an asteroid?

    I also did not mean 100% hard coding mass to size. Just if you change size - you also change mass proportionally, but you can change mass separately. And all planets in randomly generated systems have same density (or density dependent on type).

Share This Page